When you hear people spreading lies, using fallacies, drawing conclusions from bad premises, denigrating expertise, encouraging needless partisanship, or bashing intellectuals, push back.  

On spreading lies:

• Is there evidence for that? What is it?
• Does that information come from a reliable source? How do you know?
• (And try the questions in our discussion of fact checking.)

On expertise:

• Is there anything wrong with being great at something? Like what?
• Is there anything wrong with experts working hard to figure out complicated things that you and I can’t, and then sharing that knowledge?
• You rely on experts all the time, don’t you — like when you get your car fixed or go to the hospital?

On fallacies:

• Just because some _____s are _____, doesn’t mean they all are.
• Just because two things are correlated, doesn’t mean that one causes the other.

On bad premises:

• I understand that if you believe [bad premise], then logically you’d also believe [logical conclusion from bad premise]. But why do you believe [bad premise]?
• It seems as if the underlying assumption for your belief is [bad premise]. How did you decide to believe that idea in the first place?

On excellence and elitism:

• Most of the things I believe are ideas I learned from elites: excellent teachers, scholars, religious leaders, scientists, bosses, political leaders, etc. What about you?
• Aren’t role models elites? Aren’t they the people who help set the standards for the way we’re supposed to behave?

On unnecessary partisanship:

• Why should politicians adhere to litmus tests they don’t agree with?
• What’s more important: making things better or blindly obeying a party leader?

And a little punchier:

• Who came up with that, and why do you believe it?
• Remember what President Reagan taught us: trust but verify.
• How’d you decide to believe that?
• Where’d that idea really come from — did you make it up?
• I’m sure you learned lots of great stuff from your parents, but were they really experts in ________? Or, . . . but where did they get those ideas?

And when you tweet, use our favorite hashtags:

#defendintellectuals, #thatsalie, #thinkdeep, #honorexperts, #badpremise, #embracecomplexity, #challengeassumptions

Can you add to this list? Contact us to share your thoughts.